Interfering with the evidence

This is a catalogue essay for Catherine Evans’ exhibition Exploded View, in which forces of time, memory and technology are present as vibrant material residues and traces. This body of work is centred on the artist’s personal memory of witnessing as a teenager the 1997 implosion of The Royal Canberra Hospital, the place of her birth. This moment, captured on two minutes and thirty one seconds of VHS home video footage, and now viewable on YouTube, is the starting point for Exploded View. The work examines how digital media acts to distort perceptions of time in relation to place and personal and collective memory. An intimate companion to this work is Evans’ fictiōnella Copper (2020), commissioned for the slow-publishing artwork, Lost Rocks (2017–21) 2. In this edition, Evans investigates the looping and linked events emanating from the Acton Peninsula in Canberra, the site of the National Museum of Australia and previously the Royal Canberra Hospital and over 20,000 years of Aboriginal history.